How to make&break a habit?

I work in this company, Monkey Business, and I love the reason we exist. Our purpose is to make world more fun and yellow. We Monkeys believe, that people’s work should be more fun and less junk. We shape and mold the working surroundings & environments, working habits, and sometimes even the work itself. We do that through learning design and participatory methods, in a nutshell.

I’ll tell you a personal story for a change.

What I’ve noticed on doing a real-life experiment on myself, is that I am a hedonist and that I am impatient when it comes to seeing and achieving results. I have 26 years of experience on being me. I have a gut-feeling, that I can tell when my inner voice is trying to trick me on being lazy or pushing me to take the easy-way-out. This is something I’ve been working on from August 2013; doing things differently in my day-to-day (personal) life.

I chose two areas. Physical exercise and eating habits.

1. Increase exercising from once to week to 3-5 times a week.

2. Quit eating meat.

Now let me tell you, that I love exercising. When I feel like exercising. Usually it has been once to twice a week. Now that doesn’t take me to my goal, and that is achieving women’ a normal-waist widht (80cm and less). I started with a 66-day experiment, which meant 1h of exercising EVERY DAY. Yes, I reached 64/66. (Check out: http://www.the1thing.com/blog/66-day-challenge/) My exercising experiment ended 5th of October – and I’ve continued to exercise 5-6 times a week ever since. My waist widht has come down from 94cm to 82cm, first measuring was in August.

It takes time to see the change. Be patient.

About eating meat. I decided to try a Meatless Month, that was October. I’ve wanted to learn to eat more veggies, so this felt a good experiment. It felt great, so I’ve continued. Not eating meat has forced me to try out different foods and tastes. I may eat meat on Christmas, I may not. But I’ve proved to MYSELF, that I can eat light, I can feel great by just following a vegetarian diet.

Veggie soup.

I courage you to try new things. Or doing things differently. Push yourself. Do it longer than just 1 or 2 weeks. When creating a new habit or letting go an old one, there isn’t an easy way. It means you need to follow what you are doing, why you are behaving the way you do – and then, the work begins.